Twitter Reviews

7/16/08

There's almost nothing worse than when a movie falls apart at the very end. It makes it seem like such a waste, when you've been enjoying a film all along, and then the filmmakers do something so stupid to ruin all the good faith they've built up. Shrooms is just that type of film. For a low-budget horror film, I thought it was pretty well made, with some good photography, decent acting by a bunch of nobodies, a fairly interesting twist on the horror genre, a couple of cool trippy scenes, and it's all completely ruined by a last minute, unnecessary twist, that tore apart everything that I'd just seen.

Shrooms starts like a lot of horror films with a group of kids going into the woods to camp, take drugs and fornicate; and end up getting chopped into piece instead. What made it work for a good portion of the film is the care that the filmmakers take to make these cliche's somewhat different. The death scenes aren't fantastic, but the killer chasing them is made interesting by the fact that these kids are tripping out of their minds, so you're not quite sure if what they're seeing is real or a hallucination.

Each murder is telegraphed by the main girl Tara, who took some kind of super-shroom that should have killed her, but instead gave her the ability to see her friends gruesome deaths in advance. There seems to be some sort of black-hooded specter floating around these Irish woods, relishing in in the chance to chop them to bits. It also may be as simple as some mutated-redneck with a penchant for blood, which they strongly hint towards, by having a couple of backwoods brothers show up halfway through the film talking about their other crazy brother. But in the end the answer is even stupider, and ultimately doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, in the way the killer is everywhere at once.

If they hadn't bothered with the last minute twist, I would have enjoyed Shrooms so much more. They should have left the murders a bit of a mystery, not giving us a firm grasp on what actually happened. Having a bunch of tripping-teenagers as our unreliable P.O.V. would have made it different and more ambitious. The film is nicely made, with some good, dark photography, trippy editing and creepy effects. It's also fairly funny in spots, I particularly like the talking cow scene, I thought it was pretty inspired. But ultimately a film is the sum of all its parts, and the stupid tacked on ending ruined, what could have been a decent little cult classic. -Grade: C- (Seen on 5/23/08)

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About What I Watched

As a filmmaker, amateur critic and all around film buff I watch a lot of movies; about one a day on average. I enjoy all kinds of films, from the latest Hollywood trash, to obscure foreign cinema, to low-budget horror flicks, I watch them all. In 2001 I started keeping track of every single film, writing a little comment on how I felt about the film at that moment in time. I've now turned it into a blog, writing full reviews, including trailers and/or film clips for each.